Meta description and meta title – how to create them?

Meta description – text that attracts recipients

Regardless of whether we optimize a subpage, home page or article – we can modify the meta-description that appears in the search engine. It has one basic purpose, which is to persuade users to visit the site.

It has been a decade since the amount of key phrases in meta-description does not formally affect positioning. However, attractive texts improve the click-through rate (CRT), which already significantly translates into higher organic traffic.

If we exceed this number, Google will automatically cut the text by inserting ellipsis at the end. Some plugins, such as YoastSEO, have an upper limit for visibility automatically.

What are the features of effective meta description?

1. Attractiveness – make it clear to the users. What will they gain when they visit your website? Depending on the case, answer the questions “What will they learn?”, “What will they know?”, “What will they benefit from?”, etc.
2. Directness – the description needs to be addressed to the recipient, i.e. while creating content use “you” only! Many people make the mistake of making the text too informative. It is only 156 characters, so you need to encourage users to visit your website. All substantive content and difficult phrases have their place in the article or subpage.
3. CTA (Call To Action) – in order to increase conversion efficiency, call your audience to action. Words such as “Come in!”, “Find out!”, “Check!” when subjected to “dry” analysis might sound trivial, but they really attract users.

Moreover, some people suggest including keywords in the meta description. This is correct approach, as such a procedure automatically improves the reliability and clarity of the text. If your phrase is “men’s shoes”, a natural feature of a good description is that it will include the phrase “men’s shoes”

Meta title – solid title is the basis

While the description attracts the audience, the title clearly tells what the article or subpage is about. This is due to the fact that the meta-title has +/– 75 characters, so we do not have much room for maneuver. This is long enough to fit a text title with a short CTA such as “Check!”, “Look!” or the general name of the page.

Therefore, we usually have two options: title + CTA or title + separator + website title. We prefer the first option, mostly because the name of the website can be seen as the link.

Meta title usually contains a key phrase as it is a natural part of the title. Some sources suggest that each word should start with a capital letter in order to gain more attention from the user. This is a rare practice, but can still be found effective in order to stand out from the competition.